Thank you, my very dear friend, I am as well as the east wind will suffer me to be; and that, indeed, is not very well, my heart being fuller of all manner of evil than is necessary to its humanity.  But the wind is changed, and the frost is gone, and it is not quite out of my fancy yet that I may see you next summer. You and summer are not out of the question yet.  Therefore, you see, I cannot be very deep in tribulation.  But you may consider it a bad symptom that I have just finished a poem of some five hundred lines in stanzas, called ’The Lost Bower,’[73] and about nothing at all in particular.

As to Arabel, she is not an icicle.  There are flowers which blow in the frost—­when we brambles are brown with their inward death—­and she is of them, dear thing. You are not a bramble, though, and I hope that when you talk of ‘feeling the cold,’ you mean simply to refer to your sensation, and not to your health.  Remember also, dearest Mr. Boyd, what a glorious winter we have had.  Take away the last ten days and a few besides, and call the whole summer rather than winter.  Ought we to complain, really?  Really, no.

I venture another prophecy upon the shoulders of the ast, though my hand shakes so that nobody will read it.

You can’t abide my ‘Cry of the Human,’ and four sonnets.  They have none of them found favor in your eyes.

In or out of favor,

Ever your affectionate E.B.B.

Do you think that next summer you might, could, or would walk across the park to see me—­supposing always that I fail in my aspiration to go and see you?  I only ask by way of hypothesis.  Consider and revolve it so.  We live on the verge of the town rather than in it, and our noises are cousins to silence; and you should pass into a room where the silence is most absolute.  Flush’s breathing is my loudest sound, and then the watch’s tickings, and then my own heart when it beats too turbulently.  Judge of the quiet and the solitude!

[Footnote 73:  Poetical Works, iii. 105.]

To H.S.  Boyd April 19, 1843.

My very dear Friend,—­The earth turns round, to be sure, and we turn with it, but I never anticipated the day and the hour for you to turn round and be guilty of high treason to our Greeks.  I cry ’Ai! ai!’ as if I were a chorus, and all vainly.  For, you see, arguing about it will only convince you of my obstinacy, and not a bit of Homer’s supremacy.  Ossian has wrapt you in a cloud, a fog, a true Scotch mist.  You have caught cold in the critical faculty, perhaps.  At any rate, I can’t see a bit more of your reasonableness than I can see of Fingal. Sic transit!  Homer like the darkened half of the moon in eclipse!  You have spoilt for me now the finest image in your Ossian-Macpherson.